Archive for March, 2007
Wednesday, March 21st, 2007
Mike Fletcher gave a pep talk at last night's PyGTA meeting for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. They showed off some actual hardware (yay), but the project isn't as far along as I'd thought: major systems are still being designed, and parts of those designs are still ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 20th, 2007
John Backus passed away on Saturday at the age of 82. He helped invent Fortran and Backus-Naur form (familiar to everyone who's taken a compiler course), and was later a strong advocate of functional programming languages. He'll be missed...
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Monday, March 19th, 2007
Via Genome Biology (free registration for trial access required), news that scientists from the Scripps Institute have to retract five papers published in various prestigious journals because of a sign error in a computer program. As Gregory Petsko says in the article:
Their mistake has consequences beyond the damage to ...
Posted in Software Carpentry | 5 Comments »
Sunday, March 18th, 2007
Warsaw took first place; then Tsinghua, St. Petersburg, and MIT. Highest Canadian placing was Waterloo at #9; Toronto was one of twelve schools tied for 14th, along with UBC and the University of Alberta.
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Sunday, March 18th, 2007
One of the biggest changes in technical publishing in the last few years has been the "book of the blog". Joel on Software was the first to make it big, but there have been many more since. For example, I've just finished The Open Laboratory: The Best Writing on Science ...
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Thursday, March 15th, 2007
The list of mentoring organizations for this year's Google Summer of Code is now up. We're putting forward two proposals for DrProject, and one for the Online Marking Tool. If you're interested, please read Google's student guide, then contact me.
Note: student applications close on March 24th, and organizations have until ...
Posted in Announcements, DrProject, Research, Student Projects, Teaching | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 14th, 2007
I've been saying for a while now that extensible programming systems are the Next Big Thing, but I wasn't expecting them to arrive this quickly. Check out Expressive Programs Through Presentation Extension, by Eisenberg and Kiczales (at UBC). They use Java plus annotations for storage, rather than XML, which allows ...
Posted in Extensible Programming | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 14th, 2007
The regular monthly PyGTA meeting on March 20 will feature an introduction to the One Laptop Per Child project, and particularly the Python-coded Sugar development environment. It'll also have some discussion on news and events in the Python world, such as the University of Toronto choosing ...
Posted in Announcements | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 13th, 2007
Jorge Aranda reports on the largest study to date of pair programming. Interesting results, even though the study itself can be critiqued in several ways. We need lots more of this kind of empirical research in software engineering...
Posted in Research | No Comments »
Monday, March 12th, 2007
I wasn't able to go to SIGCSE this year, but I browed the papers on the weekend. There was lots of good stuff; here are my favorites out of the more than 200 pieces of work presented:
Chase, Oakes, & Ramsey: Using Live Projects Without Pain: The Development of the ...
Posted in Teaching | No Comments »